In reality grade school kids in a playground deal with the conservation of momentum on a regular basis, they just don't know the equation. But they can predict how masses of various sizes will behave more or less when they collide with each other.
Really? In my experience grade school kids, until they've studied high school level physics, are only good at predicting the results of collisions of objects they're familiar with at scales they're familiar with. Ask ten-year-olds what would likely happen if two earth-sized planets were to collide with one another. Most would probably describe them bouncing off each other like basketballs, because they're familiar with basketballs and that's what basketballs do when they collide. A few might predict instead that they'd get shattered into fragments that would go flying out in all directions, because that's kind of like what happened to the planet in Star Wars when the Death Star shot it. Very very few will make the correct prediction that they would coalesce into a hot molten mass. (What would your prediction be, by the way?)
The laws of physics are the same for the basketballs and the planets. (They don't appear to apply to the Death Star, but that's okay because the Death Star is a made up thing in a made up story.) But the effects of those laws in action are very different, because of differences in materials and scale. Same for your washers versus the WTC towers.
The supposed downward collisions of the WTC towers make no sense in terms of the way mass and strength must be distributed in a skyscraper in order for it to support its weight and withstand the wind for 28 years.
And yet, when you do the calculations based on the laws of physics, the collapses do make sense. You're making the same mistake as the children who guess that colliding planets would act like colliding basketballs, and for the same reason: you're applying intuition in a way that assumes that things at different scales behave the same, just because the underlying laws are the same. Such intuition is not based on analysis of those laws but on analogies with things you're more directly familiar with, like colliding vehicles. Ironically, applying those very same unchanging physical laws is what tells us that things don't behave the same at different scales, and in what ways, and why.
So why haven't we been told the TONS of STEEL and TONS of CONCRETE that were on every level?
Have you tried using the magic word?
Seriously, how many experts have you sent a polite communication requesting, "I'm having difficulty finding data with sufficient precision for a model I'm working on. Could you please cite me the best available sources of data from which the mass of the exterior column and spandrel assemblies at each floor?"
Maybe I've missed it, but I don't recall you actually asking that question even here at the forum. Instead you ask, "Why haven't we been told the MASS OF etc..." which is like asking why haven't we been told the number of jellybeans that would fill the Titanic. The raw data is available for anyone who wants to calculate it, and no one else (not even, as you point out, Richard Gage) cares.
Why doesn't RICHARD GAGE make a big deal about it?
Apparently, Richard Gage hasn't reached the same conclusions about the significance of the precise mass of the wall units that you have. This suggests that at least one of you is wrong. Which is not, by the way, evidence that either of you are right.
You are of course free to explain what principles of physics are violated in my models. Of course they are sufficiently simple to build and test yourself so it should be hard for me to cheat.
Physical models don't violate the laws of physics. But the conclusions you draw from them might.
Colliding basketballs bounce off each other, in accordance with the laws of physics. But concluding from that that colliding planets bounce off each other ignores the laws of physics.
Colliding planets melt and coalesce, in accordance with the laws of physics. But concluding from that that colliding basketballs would melt and coalesce ignores the laws of physics.
Washers of a certain size supported by toothpicks of a certain size at certain distances arrest collapse part way down, in accordance with the laws of physics. But concluding from that that collapsing buildings must arrest collapse part way down ignores the laws of physics.
Respectfully,
Myriad
